Jonone

Artiste célèbre

Artist, graffiti artist and painter, John Andrew Perello, better known as JonOne, was born in New York in 1963. He began tagging the streets of Harlem at age 17, adorning subway walls and trains with his lettering and his blaze of the time:

"Jon156" (his street number, which he will then give up in favor of "JonOne"). "The metro is a museum that runs through the city," he says, acknowledging the influence the discovery of graffiti on the rails had and marking the city with a colorful trail. It was his meeting with A-One (alias Anthony Clark), friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat, at the turn of the 1980s, which will forever define his status as an artist: “A-One was the link between the street and the world of art. He traveled to Europe and came back with a lot of money, just because of his art. I listened to his travelogues and my eyes were shining with envy. At that time in New York, I was like many now: I was hanging out in front of my apartment building. In those times, I didn't leave my neighborhood either. Thanks to A-One, I started to visit exhibitions, to feed my vision of what was going on in this world. I started to take my job seriously, not to see it as vandalism but just art. "

In 1987, he left the United States for Paris, after having met the artist Bando (Philippe Lehman of his real name), he will then roam the streets of the capital in the company of the pioneers of graffiti and French hip hop and thus to fully consume their hexagonal marriage, never leaving the territory, leaving their own pictorial mark according to their descents. He met auctioneer Cornette de Saint-Cyr who offered him to set up his studio in the Ephemeral Hospital, a squat established in the Bretonneau Hospital in the 1990s where renowned artists as well as illustrious unknowns performed.

Consequently, JonOne will go from urban art to canvas, in perfect autodidact, developing a universe where graffiti and lettering mingle, memories of his New York years, but also what he calls his “freestyle” , populated with colors and imbued with boundless freedom. Vitality, mastery of form and colors, dynamics of gesture, abstract expressionism, everything matches the success for which the street artist is preparing.

Discovered by the fashion designer agnès b., Who then perceives the "nascent work of a true painter" and buys him two paintings, he embarks on a series of solo shows and other personal exhibitions (notably in France and Germany) . Faced with its growing notoriety, the auction house ARTCURIAL will auction in 2007 a painting from 1993 entitled "Match Ball", sold for a record sum of 24,800 euros (this unprecedented amount in JonOne's career will be dethroned by other estimates explosions in subsequent sales in this same house).

JonOne exhibits and is now collected all over the world: from Paris to New York, via Berlin, Tokyo or Hong Kong, street art collectors and contemporary art institutions, all want to display a work of the artist. American urban. Which, moreover, will also multiply prestigious partnerships:

In 2009, he repainted a Thalys for the launch of the line to Amsterdam, and in 2012, he customized Eric Cantona’s Rolls Royce, intended for auction for the benefit of the Abbé Pierre Foundation. In 2015, he inaugurated the monumental work "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" (300 x 220 cm) between the walls of the National Assembly, where stamps will be issued bearing the image of this work. The following year took place the inaugural flight from Paris to New York of the Air France Boeing 777 in the colors of JonOne, and that same year the latter collaborated with the house of Guerlain by revisiting their Bee bottle, producing 98 unique pieces. Socially engaged, in 2011 he produced a monumental fresco in the 18th arrondissement of Paris in homage to Abbé Pierre, an initially ephemeral work but which local authorities have worked to preserve ever since.

In 2017, the Hennessy cognac house will ask the artist to customize and sign a limited edition of their famous VS bottle, which is present in nearly 50 countries.
In 2018, Jonone will be invited by the Ministry of Culture in Morocco to exhibit at the Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat and unveil his gigantic 300 m2 work on the tower of the national library.

This is the largest work ever produced by the artist.

JonOne who describes himself as an “abstract expressionist graffiti painter”.

stands today as an emblematic figure of street art, and contemporary world art. He is to date the most important abstract expressionist in activity, from the world of Graffiti.


Pushing Buttons (vendu)

Price : 16500 Euros